Mule-headed Marxists and Hours of Labor

by Jehu

That argument is that any reduction of hours of labor must lead to a fall in the material subsistence of the working class. They know or should know that this argument violates every assumption in labor theory of value, but they insist on spreading it among the working class. Why they insist on spreading this complete fabrication is beyond me, but I am now going to educate them. At the end of my refutation, these “Marxists” will either concede they are completely wrong, or turn tail and run.

Here is the average hourly wages for a US worker between 1939 and 2014:

As can be seen from the chart, average hourly wages increased 40-fold from $0.49 in 1939 to $19.50 in January of 2014. I want to know from the Socialist Equality Party whether they think this means the real material subsistence of the working class increased 40-fold. Does the mere increased in wages denominated in valueless inconvertible fiat dollars imply an actual improvement of the working class? Are more working class families living in poverty today than in, say, 1970?

The Socialist Equality Party knows or should know that the fiat currency wages of the working class has nothing whatsoever to do with their subsistence. Yet, on the Socialism Reddit, these “Marxists” have insisted there is some connection between currency wages and real wages. Now either you are such hopelessly incompetent students of Marx that you don’t know the difference between real and currency wages, or you are deliberately trying to mislead radical minded workers.

Although wages denominated in valueless fiat dollars have increased 40-fold since 1939, by any objective measure this has not been true of working class subsistence. Working class homes are not forty times the size they were in 1939 nor do they own 40 times as many cars; they don’t eat 40 times as much food, wear forty times as many clothes, or use 40 times as much heat to warm their homes. They have not saved forty times as much money as they did in 1939, taken 40 times as many vacations, or retired any earlier than in 1939.

So, where the fuck did all this extra cash go?

In fact, the real material subsistence of the working class has declined since 1939 despite a constant increase in the currency denominated wages. The Socialist Equality Party sect know this is true, but prefer to ignore it because otherwise they cannot frighten the working class with tales of how less wage slavery will impoverish them. But if wages have been rising for the last 75 years while the real subsistence of the working class has been falling for most of that time, could it be these wages don’t measures the real subsistence of the working class?

How is it possible that wages, which are said to be determined by the value of labor power, no longer measure the value of anything? Has a single member of this hopelessly amateurish sect ever taken the time to understand how wages can rise, while the real commodities the wages actually buy falls? Of course not. Instead of actually making a materialist analysis of post-war fiat currency, this useless sect of vanguardists simply ignore it.

So let me briefly review why currency wages are meaningless for them: In labor theory, value must be expressed in the form of exchange value, i.e., in a definite quantity of another commodity. The commodity serving as the measure of the value of commodities is the money commodity, or universal equivalent. However, if the vanguardist simpletons of the Socialist Equality Party had taken the time to study post-war fiat, they might have noticed that, since 1971, this fiat has not had any commodity standard; which means the wages paid to the working class are not tied to any material expression of socially necessary labor time. The currency wages paid to the working class are simply colored pieces of paper with some dead president’s face on it.The reason why wages can rise, while the material conditions of the class declines is that the wages are worthless — an illusion, a meaningless distraction from real relations of society.

Once this worthless paper currency is measured against money, as Marx defined that category in Capital, we immediately notice something: Ever greater quantities of worthless paper are required to purchase the same quantity of a commodity money:

The value of labor power can only be expressed in gold or another commodity money. But since currency is only a token of commodity money, not money itself, currency wages can be anything. Since currency can be printed out in any quantity and handed out as wages, there is no limit on how high these wages can rise. It is only when the worker actually goes to the store to buy food for her family that she notices how worthless her wages are.

There are nominal wages — i.e., the paper wages paid out to the worker in some form of valueless fiat currency — and then there are real wages — the actual commodities these wages can buy. No discussion of wages and hours of labor can make sense unless we draw a clear distinction between real and nominal wages.

The bourgeois simpleton, John Maynard Keynes, made just this sort of distinction when he proposed to forcibly increase the labor day during the Great Depression by slashing the real wages of the working class. According to Keynes, the working class would focus on nominal wages not real wages. So long as worthless nominal wages rose, the workers would not notice their real wages were falling.

Thus, where wages once had to be slashed outright by the capitalists to increase profits, Keynes figured a way to cut them using inflationary fiscal and monetary policy. The workers might notice that inflation was eating away at their wages, but Keynes explained the working class could not very well go on strike every time prices rose. If wages could be continuously slashed by inflation, there would be little or no limit on how much hours of labor could be increased. Keynes did not make a secret of his idea and you can even find the book, “General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money”, on Marxists.org.

All the members of the Socialist Equality Party have to do is read the book and they would know why there has been a constant increase in hours of labor. If these would-be vanguardist leaders of the working class had actually read the fucking book, they would know longer hours of labor have always been accompanied by falling wages, not the reverse. And for good reason: impoverished workers living paycheck to paycheck and suffocating under ever growing debt have no problem with ever longer hours of labor.

When measured in a valid commodity money, as labor theory requires, wages are lower now than they were in 1970:

It does not matter that nominal wages are now 40 times higher than they were in 1939, in term of what these wages can buy they have fallen and this gives rise to a perverse reaction: Like a mule being led by a carrot on a stick, the worker thinks she can escape poverty by working more hours:

The more inflation eats away at the purchasing power of her wages, the more hours she works to offset the fall in her real wages. But this has a further perverse result: the more hours of labor she works and the more intensively she works, the more she pushes her fellow workers out of productive employment, increaseing competition for her own job and driving down her own real wages. As Marx explains in Wage Labor and Capital, by working longer and more intensively the worker becomes her own competition and drive herself deeper into poverty.

All of this should be obvious to the Socialist Equality Party, but it clearly is not. Like most vanguardist sects, it has little or no mastery of even the simplest principles of labor theory, yet it laughingly imagines itself a leader of the working class. Your ignorance of basic labor theory is shocking and unconscionable. Any communist with even a passing familiarity with labor theory knows there can be no advantage to the worker to work more hours of wage slavery.

Dissolve your sect and stop being an obstacle to the proletarian cause.

My concerns would be:
1) How do you address overtime pay as an incentive for longer hours? This would encourage workers to work longer, and while it would decrease the rate of surplus value, it would have benefits of reducing training and tax costs. Unless workers agree to refuse overtime, wouldn’t this prevent price deflation and encourage inflation in basic goods, as workers who did work overtime would have higher purchasing power?
2) The multiple worker scenarios retain the rate of surplus value and absolute surplus value for the 8 hour period. There is some additional overhead. It does reduce worker salaries, which could lead to deflation, but as we see today, usually it is made up for in debt accumulation.
3) While it is true that the surplus value increases with longer hours, reduction of hours will at first affect industries that have lower rates of surplus value, thus encouraging consolidation into monopolies/trusts which can spread working capital to fund mechanization. In the face of worker revolt will smaller companies get the funding they would need to mechanize? If industry is further consolidated, doesn’t that reduce the worker labor power as well as increase the ability for the companies to obtain superprofits, which are then not shared with labor.
4) How likely is it really to get price deflation? Especially considering that most production is outside the U.S. Do you really think that military industrial complex employees are going to do this?

I don’t agree with your assessment of the affect of 2 workers on surplus
value.

Imagine that you have the skills for a production job. You are working 8 hours a day. You are paid $80 ($10 an hour) for your 8 hour day’s labor. To realize 100% surplus value the products of that 8 hour day need to be sold for $160. Mr. Tesla invents a method of cloning you. You go to work a 8am and leave at 12pm. Your clone goes to work at 12pm and leaves at 4pm. Nothing has changed, except you will receive $40 in payment and your clone will receive $40 in payment. The realization of the 8 hours of goods produced ($160) has not changed. The surplus value remains the same $160/(40+40) -1 . Mr. Boss still has $80, but your purchasing power has dropped.

Mr. Boss can maximize rate of surplus value by:
– decreasing the hours of work and maintaining or increasing the realization price. ( productivity gain or superprofit via marketing/luxury market/monopoly)
– increasing the realization price alone (luxury market/marketing/monopoly)
– decreasing the hourly rate of pay
– extending hours of labor should reduce surplus value, and would IF it wasn’t offset by additional production. At a certain point, extending hours of production hits the exhaustion or harm of workers, State rules, or decreases in productivity. Better to let the workers sleep for a few hours, and come back the next day. Or just hire more workers.

The costs of maximizing realization price come out of the Capitalists share.
The costs of reducing hours of labor come out of the Capitalists share through Capital Machinery expenses. One needs to look at Department I vs. Department II and the affect on each during crises. But the reduction of hours of labor affects the workers more, and thus they go into debt or attempt to work a part time job, or accept overtime, which counters the deflationary nature of the reduction.

Other capitalists figure out that you have a realization price and compete with you, thus lowering your realization price. Unless you have a State enforced monopoly via patent protection or create monopoly by gathering Capitals to buy out smaller capitals. One can also file a frivolous lawsuit, pay the media to ruin the other capitals etc.

Back to the scenario…As there is no cloning method, you and your colleagues decide to tell management that you no longer want to work 8 hours. You want to work 6 hours. Management says, ok. But anyone who wants to work overtime, I will pay 1.5x your regular rate. Weekends it will be 2x. There is plenty of demand for the product you make and the realization price and thus the superprofit is high. Labor is the limitation in the scenario. Your colleagues are now torn between making more money to go on that vacation to Disney World or that flat panel TV, and taking time off to read Marx with less money in their pockets. Meanwhile bourgeois boss is calculating whether paying you extra (human robots) is more profitable than mechanizing in a certain timeframe.

In the mean-time, local management is talking to Mr. Chou. He has a created a very big factory with money loaned to him at very favorable interest rates by the State Bank. There are many young people (mainly women) in patriarchal villages throughout the countryside who are bored, sick of misogyny, and who think the streets are paved with gold in the big city. They don’t realize that they will never be accepted as non-second class citizens in the urban areas, so they get on a bus to go to the factory. The factory is a machine itself. A machine for reducing the labor costs (subsistence) to a bare minimum, to maximize their surplus value while simultaneously offering local management a larger surplus value than with local Union 209. Mr. Chou realizes that the current workers are disposable and will be replaced when their productivity fails as they age. There is no long-term commitment to pensions, healthcare, so the health and well-being of the workers is not a concern. They also know that the female workers will not be able to get a husband in the urban area and will then decide to leave (when they are in their late 20s) and go back to the village to reproduce a future generation of workers at no cost of reproduction.

So the only industries left at home are State supported monopolies (agriculture, high-tech, and military), healthcare and education (debt based) and luxury companies that can absorb high labor costs due to high realization values (sharing of superprofits). All of these workers, the management infrastructure, and government requires low paid servicers to reproduce them, as they are busy doing the work of management.